This Little Light

Set in 2023, this near-future novel imagines a United States where the religious right holds power. Over just two days, Rory Ann Miller and her best friend are fugitives, wanted for allegedly bombing their wealthy California high school during an American Virtue Ball. A bounty hangs over them, online mobs hunt them, and police, attack helicopters and drones close in.

Rory's mother, a lawyer and social activist, has been arrested and drawn into the accusations against her daughter. Her father, who abandoned his wife and child during a bitter divorce, is helping the authorities. The world around Rory is made of gated communities, born-again Christians, Probationary Citizens (once called Dreamers), and laws that have made abortion and birth control illegal again. Teenagers take virginity oaths, and a shadowy trade called the Red Market may be either a conservative myth meant to rally the base or a real criminal ring that sells unwanted babies and fetal tissue to buyers in the cosmetics and pharmaceutical industries.

Rory is cynical, frightened and angry, and she has been betrayed and is searching for someone she can trust. Her view of the fathers, employers and politicians who work to keep women in their place, and of the ways women sometimes help bring about their own subjugation, is sharp, funny, sorrowful and candid. Lori Lansens is also the author of The Girls and The Mountain Story.